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Britain starts building new polar research ship

Xinhua, October 18, 2016 Adjust font size:

By laying the keel, Britain has officially started the construction of a new polar research ship, which will be equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and robotic technologies, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) announced on Monday.

The ship, being built at Cammell Laird on Merseyside, is expected to be operational in 2019, and will provide a research platform from which scientists will study key environmental issues, such as climate change, future sea level rise and the impact of environmental change on marine biodiversity, according to the BAS.

One of the new technologies that will be deployed from the 128 meter-long vessel, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, is the Autosub Long Range (ALR) Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.

The ALR, the focal point of the government-funded Polar Explorer Program, could be used by oceanographers to measure ocean and seabed properties over ocean scales, according to the BAS.

This 200-million-pound(243.99 million U.S. dollars) government investment in the new research ship, and a suite of infrastructure projects that will support it, "will be a huge transformation in the way that BAS delivers its science programs and its provision of operational support to the UK science community", said Professor Jane Francis, Director of BAS. Endit